Community Involvement and the Magic of Gaming

Learning new games can be difficult, since board games take learning the rules outright before you play and RPGs take commitment to a setting and a system to understand. Finding the easiest games to learn is essential in my line of work and nowadays Magic: The Gathering is strangely the easiest thing out there. There's free video games to learn the basics, intro decks to understand how to play in person, and even though there's years of cards to learn; typically the Standard set of Magic makes rules interactions the easiest. I know I've spoken a lot about how Magic integrates with the store, but this may be the post that explains why I keep doing it. 

Magic is a gateway game. The second someone knows how to play Magic, they're going to make a friend across the table who they learn to play games with immediately. As they make more friends and get better there's going to be more and more complexity to their gaming experience. In my mind, that means that eventually they'll have 4-5 friends that want to play something that lasts longer than the typical 40 minute Magic game. So naturally this means that the more people feel comfortable with Magic, the more likely they are to play board games and break into a world that is built for cooperative/competitive play with many moving parts. It is because of this progression of actions that I'm always on the lookout for new players so that I can eventually get them into the world of table-top gaming on a larger scale.

It is for this reason that I'm going to attend a PTQ run by another local game store called Black Gold. A friend and I have been learning to build decks competitively and want to participate in their smaller all-day-tournaments so that we can 1. Win some cool prizes, 2. Meet some competitive players that we don't normally play, and 3. Show that local game stores can compete casually for the benefit of growing the hobby as a whole. Initially I was concerned about the perceived impact my playing in a tournament would have; namely "Why is a competing store playing in an event, taking packs, winning with their 'inside knowledge'?" but I think there's value to be had in making a showing with an AQ playmat and meeting people. By participating in a big tournament I can learn how to be a better player, which will ultimately help my store grow. I can also show support for the growing tournament scene, support another local store by showing up, and grow the hobby into a greater friendlier experience for all involved. 

Camaraderie with local game stores is hard to come by. Most players think we're all competing with each other to put another out of business and it is in their benefit to get the most out of one store over another price-wise until one disappears and another rises in its' place. Since I've been here in Arvada I've tried to be a friendly store always looking out for where players can get what I don't have. There's always a game you don't carry or don't have a community for, so I direct players all the time to stores nearby that can better serve their needs. Only through working together do smaller stores survive, so showing support for another local store seems like a way to find the players that can't get all the way South to the guys running the tournament and capture players that might live closer to my shoppe and not have heard of me yet. 

The experience of building decks with friends is an exercise in statistics and social interaction. There's a whole world of experience in tournament settings that influences overall prices of cards and value of cards in particular over another. Every time I build a deck with a friend of mine we learn a little something new about how to counter each other's concepts, which we've arguably only learned by playing and discussing strategies with another over the table. We've played RPGs together and find synergy within our class-concepts all the time to build party cohesion, so the experience in Magic is very similar. Through one table-top game we progress our expertise in another as understanding systems is essential to any games we play. 

I hope to learn something valuable from playing in a tournament on a larger scale than ones I run all the time and at the very least can thank local players for being as good as they are for informing the meta and growth of the hobby towards something competitive and powerful for building communities. We'll see if I lose like a fool or win by some stroke of luck, but hopefully I can find new players interested in participating in the larger community of table-top gaming and better represent my store as something bigger than itself. As something concerned with the success of all local stores and the development of something as simple as a hobby into something as important as a community.